Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)

The root cause of the problem is that copper coaxial cable tv based (DOCSIS3.0, DOCSIS3.1, etc) last mile internet infrastructure is a shared/contended access medium for many modems connected to it.

It's built on a limited number of RF channels in a certain segment that have many modems all going to a single "port" on a DOCSIS CMTS (cablemodem termination system).

There is a great deal of absurdity in their claims to be selling a gigabit service product using coax-based technology, when the oversubscription ratio is INSANE. If you had more than a few customers on a segment trying to actually make use of gigabit speeds at one time (just 2 or 3 people downloading a torrent of a popular linux ISO at 980 Mbps will eat a huge amount of the total aggregate capacity of that coax segment).

Cox and Comcast and RCN and similar operators are squeezing every last dollar possible for the ROI out of legacy copper coaxial last mile stuff. Only in places where the local phone company or another operator is building proper FTTH (GPON/XGSPON) are they starting to overbuild their own network with their own FTTH. Comcast is doing it in the Seattle area, for instance, in areas where the local telco (Ziply or Centurylink) offers a symmetric 1 Gbps product based on single strand FTTH/GPON.

Your average coaxial cable tv last mile operator like Cox is a telecom industry dinosaur.

The article here was published in early 2020 during peak covid19 lockdown but the general technology problem of copper/coaxial last mile stuff from 25+ years ago is exactly the same today.

This article is from 2020.

Very familiar with Cox as they are the only cable provider in my area and fiber largely has not made it to any other part of the city except the really new and wealthy areas.

While I have not yet run into any caps with my gigabit plan I am painfully aware of how limited the so called "unlimited" gigabit plan is. During COVID it was particularly egregious. I was paying about what Mike was paying except from the hours of 11am to around 9pm my download would be capped at 10Mbps or so and my upload halved from whatever it is to around 2Mbps. Cox didn't have the common courtesy to tell anyone that they were QoSing entire city blocks because their "infrastructure couldn't handle it". I only learned this by isolating the network and running my own tests. After what felt like 30 escalations with their tech support and a large portion of my night they all but confirmed they were doing this to handle the "streaming services". I work from home - this was a major problem. Despite this I was simply upsold yet another super-duper plan rather than given anything I could work with.

I get regular outages with them and run my own tests on the coax. Despite having noise levels that are pretty good for the most part their service still doesn't work right all the time. Despite my insistence calling a tech out their labyrinthine tech support tree all but prevents you from talking to anyone but a moron with a flowchart where all roads lead to "reset the modem" or "upsell hardware" and a hands free phone.

I used to run my own modem as I prefer to control my hardware. When I upgraded to gigabit years ago I was forced to lease a modem from them as prior to this they refused to service my house with third party hardware installed. All problems were always blamed on my modem, or my router, or anything they could point to that wasn't them. Dealing with their technical support or on-call techs was worse than pulling teeth. It was like performing dental surgery with a sledgehammer.

I won't get into what it was like cancelling my cable TV. Yet another mess made more complicated by the same situation. At least it was easy to drop off the set-top boxes at the local store.

I hate the amount of control ISPs have over us with the last-mile laws. Companies like Cox can more-or-less do whatever they want in my town because they're the biggest players with the most pipes. The result is as expected - terrible service, fine print bear traps, and high cost.

The engineering problem here is in limitation in aggregate Mbps/Gbps capacity in a specific last-mile service segment for N number of end user residential customers, due to use of DOCSIS3 on coax vs more modern FTTH access methods. Nothing to do with peering/net neutrality at the local city's IX point or how the ISP exchanges traffic with other AS.

For many years the Canadian ILEC Telus branded its last mile copper based ASDL2+ and VDSL2 products (10 Mbps to 100 Mbps, approximately) as "Optik" with lots of marketing images of fiber optic cables, when it was of course anything but. The DSLAM would have a fiber uplink, sure, but definitely not the last mile.